Angle

How to Stretch IT Resources

Most IT staffs have a lot on their plates these days. Not only do they have to address the day-to-day chores of maintaining their companies’ networks and everything related to them, they now also have to contend with the bring-your-own-device trend, the increasingly uncertain security environment, the push and pull being created among departments due to the rise of the cloud, and the fact that digital transformation has put them at the epicenter of their companies’ new strategic efforts.

That said, anything these folks can do to offload some of the repetitive tasks they do can free up time that might otherwise be spent on more strategic pursuits. That’s the aim of IT service management firm BMC with its new MyIT offering.

MyIT is a self-service app that uses location, role, and preferences to guide employees to the answers and resources they need to address their issues. Users can input questions into the MyIT app and it will automatically send response.

“This product has taken off like a rocket,” said Robin Purohit, president of service support at BMC, who told me that MyIT is now employed by 9 million end users.

BMC and ServiceNow are the worldwide service desk management software leaders, according to IDC (News - Alert). Other leaders in this space, according to IDC, are Cherwell Software, CA Technologies, IBM, and HP. Awesomative, Desk.com, Freshdesk, LANDESK, Zendesk, and Zoho (News - Alert) are also players in the service help desk management arena.

As Dave Stephens, vice president and general manager of service management at ServiceNow (News - Alert), told me in an interview late last year, there are three main challenges IT faces today in meeting both the requirements of the business at large and the employees in particular. That includes delivering a great experience, offering more transparency so the businesses for which they work can better understand the value of various IT functions, and speed.

In November of 2014 ServiceNow unveiled ServiceNow Express, a cloud-based IT service management solution that offers incident, problem, and change automation to speed the assignment and resolution of tickets, fix recurring issues, and help IT teams stop managing services with email; asset tracking to replace spreadsheets with a single system of record to see what assets the IT team manages, where assets reside, how they are performing, and what issues are tagged to them; Visual Task Boards to give IT managers an easy way to assign the team work through a drag-and-drop interface, including changing assignee, adding tasks, resetting priorities, and collaborating with the team; and one-click reporting on any metric to track performance and demonstrate the value of IT to business leaders.

“Getting incident management up and running quickly with ServiceNow Express was a big win for us, as we are seeing up to a 20 percent improvement in the time it takes to resolve open issues,” said Sid Bhatnagar, senior vice president and CIO at Ziegler. “We also needed an IT service automation solution that could grow with us. As we transform our IT operations, this system will provide the foundation to manage other services, such as those supporting our wealth management team.”

Neha Patel, vice president of IT operations at DealerSocket, said that company used to run changes through email and phone conversations, but that Express added a formal change process, which has helped it keep users informed and streamline the auditing process.

“Now we can run reports out of Express that show the changes our team made,” Patel said. “Other divisions have seen the value and have requested the Express change application for their own use. We merged three legacy ticketing processes into one. Express has been key to taking full control of IT.”